The first day of school always leaves me breathless, heart pounding, with palms just a bit dampened. After more than a few first days, I’ve learned that each year speaks with a unique voice. You can’t duplicate a school year. Weather changes. The learners change. Life changes. The narrative we write each year emerges from … Continue reading »

After RSCON3 I noticed an inducement to fill out a survey. I never win these things, but the questions being asked were quite good ones and allowed me to be a bit provocative in my response. I mean, really, who was ever going to see this. Besides, the drawing was already over. As an intrinsic … Continue reading »

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an … Continue reading »

This was part of my speech on August 7 at Portland, Oregon during the 8th Annual AERO Conference — Transforming Education & Our World and was originally posted at the TEDxKids@BC website. I hope you will enjoy the video I made for the occasion – bear in mind that this was my first attempt at video editing! I am … Continue reading »

Our world and its education still have a long way to go, but I, for one, feel transformed. After an extended weekend in Portland for this year’s AERO conference with some of the most amazing people on the globe, I have seen the potential of an impassioned, informed, and caring group of individuals working for … Continue reading »

This is cross-posted from my blog because it is just that important a message. I just watched this amazing TED talk by Jeremy Gilley. I thought to myself, what I can do on this day to support peace? I’ve decided that one thing I will do is blog about peace, and share Jeremy’s message … Continue reading »

via Lost In Recursion. Last year my favorite course was my hardest to teach. I felt very strongly about the material, thinking almost constantly about it and how we could spend our time experiencing it. And yet, most days I felt class was stale and that the students felt and thought little during the experience. … Continue reading »

I am a blogger for IDEA, and through Melia Dicker and Adam Burk, I was invited to post here at the Coop. I just thought that I should give an introduction before I begin contributions. I became aware of democratic education through an offbeat series of events (but who doesn’t find out about it that … Continue reading »

The ability to hold two conflicting truths simultaneously isn’t easy. And that’s exactly what our work in education calls us to do at this moment. I am just returning from the AERO and Holistic Education conferences, where I saw COOPsters David Loitz, Casey Caronna, Paul Freedman and Jen Groves. (Oh yeah!) One evening at AERO, … Continue reading »

Google+ is the rage…much as Google WAVE was, but people seem to be sticking with + in a different way. It’s interesting to me that circles were such a big deal when it first began, but no one seems to be talking about them any more. I have to talk about them. They’ve been bothering … Continue reading »

Lesson plan. Lecture. Notes. Test. Rinse. Repeat. We’ve all seen classrooms that operate like this. In fact, I’m sure that we’ve all been in classrooms that have operated like this. Mine wasn’t so different when I started teaching. I still vividly recall my first year: part of our drama 9 curriculum was to teach the … Continue reading »

For my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent post I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from Making Our Children More Humane: In his book, Teacher and Child, Haim Ginott shares a letter provided to all the teachers in a school on the … Continue reading »